There's a new piece of Free software called weblate[1] for localizing
software. I have set up an experimental website using it at
http://l10n.unpythonic.net/
one aspect of this software that is relevant to us is that it has good
git integration: adding or revising a translation creates a local git
commit, which can later be merged into the version at git.linuxcnc.org.
It's my hope that software like this can remove some of the technical
barriers to user-contributed translations, by making it unnecessary to
learn the details of git and the "po" file format. (it can never erase
all the technical barriers, because for instance it's still necessary to
understand what %s and %d mean)
If you are interested in translating the user interface portions of
LinuxCNC into your language, I invite you to give it a try. Start by
creating an account. Once you've activated your account, navigate to
"LinuxCNC experimental web translation" and then choose subproject
"v2.5" (or just start at
http://l10n.unpythonic.net/projects/linuxcnc/linuxcnc-25/
) click the language you wish to work on, and then "not translated
strings" or "fuzzy strings" to find strings to work on.
If you don't care to create an account you can still use the "suggest"
button to suggest a translation, which can be approved by a user with an
account.
Please only enter real translations in l10n.unpythonic.net, though.
If you want to play with the weblate without the need to worry about
contributing good translations, you can try the weblate demo site:
http://demo.weblate.org/
Right now the contributed translations are not feeding back into the
linuxcnc.org git repository, they're just going somewhere on my personal
server. However, if people do real translation work on
l10n.unpythonic.net I'll make my best effort to get these translations
into the linuxcnc.org version of the software.
Jeff
[1] http://weblate.org/